Prepared Notes for Special Meeting
Marc A. Schare
Work -
The idea behind a spending
cap is simple. In exchange for passing a levy, the district agrees to hold the
increase in expenditures to a given percentage. This would guarantee to the
community that the district lives within the resources that the community has
provided for it.
The cap can be a hard number
such as 3% or it could be a function of the inflation rate + enrollment growth (or
decline). The cap can have exclusions for unanticipated situations. Capital
improvements would be exempted from the cap and if we receive unrestricted
federal dollars, for example, we can exclude those from the cap as well.
What would the cap
accomplish? By agreeing to artificially limit spending, we are giving the
community confidence that levy dollars will last as long as we say they will
last and that we won’t go on a spending spree just because we have a large cash
balance. We will also be communicating to internal and external audiences our
intention to do more with less.
The last two operating
levy votes have told us that our constituents are concerned with business as
usual. The current five year forecast is the very definition of business as
usual as it suggests that we would require 3 property tax increases in the next
5 years and that a 7.4 mill levys has the effect of pushing out the first
enormous deficit by but a single year. The community is suggesting through
their votes and the many correspondences that we have received that something
must be done. A spending cap might be the bold stroke people are looking for.
Note that while I’m
introducing this proposal, I am in no way proposing what that cap might be or
how much it should be. Our treasurer and I have kicked around a number of
possibilities and community engagement is an option to explain what we are
doing and why and soliciting feedback. This proposal is in the formative stage and it is possible that it is too late to
entertain this concept for the current levy. In any event, I am not in favor of implementing the
spending cap for the 09-10 fiscal year. The earliest it could start in the
2010-2011 fiscal year.
If there is interest, the
proposal could be researched further. I’ve spoken to members of the Columbus
Board of Education and the experiences with their spending cap are decidedly
mixed. In